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Sunday, July 12, 2015

In the summa' time

Whether you immediately started thinking Mungo Jerry or Will Smith & DJ Jazzy Jeff, summertime is here and in full bloom. And if I'm going to admit, I thought of Will Smith first, but that's because that song came out during my angsty teenage summers and it was a summer anthem for a couple of summers. One of the nights that E was in town, we hit up a place called Preston's Hope. It's an amazing playground that I'm upset that we only found a couple of weeks before we are leaving CLE. I will mention that we took home our fair share of sand in Finn's hair, thanks to some little boy who thought sand resembled "dolla bills y'all" & he was making it rain. And I will not admit that our bed STILL has sand in it (no judging -- I like to think of it as a natural exfoliate while I sleep). Our summer is flying back and it seems that we aren't really doing everything that I had envisioned us doing. Two reasons why?

First is this whole moving across country nonsense. Our summer is really whacked out. E isn't here half of the time, which puts me in single-mom survival mode -- just squeaking through the day, leaving the house in a state of constant shambles. I feel like my house has never been so dirty, even though I'm trying to pack up and let go of things that we no longer need. Dirty and me have never been good friends (unless it's a dirty mouth -- then we are besties). And when E is here, we don't really do as much fun things as I think we should because he is recovering from all the travel that he is doing or dealing with the whole-buying-a-house junk.

And second... My kids look like they have fought Mike Tyson after a mosquito bite. I think that I have shared that I am a flame to the mosquito's moth. My kids have unfortunately inherited my flame-gene. But what's crazy is that when they get bit by a mosquito, it swells up 5x the size. We went to the ER one morning two weeks ago for a severely swollen lip, which the PA determined was an abscess and it was only two bug bites; one on Fish's lip and one on his chin. And just last week, Finn's ankle ballooned up. It made me super nervous as it look like elephantiasis (only slightly joking), but even though her poor little skin was stretched so taunt on that ankle and she had rolls around her cankles, she said that it didn't hurt or itch. So I gave her some Benadryl and waited to see if it went down. It took 4-5 days to return to normal. So due to their severe allergic reactions to mosquitos and the fact that mosquitos seem to be really bad this year, we don't go outside as often as I would like. I read that most children are allergic to some degree and that it would dissipate over time, which I hope holds true in our cases.

You can see remnants of her cankle on her right ankle -- this is on day 4 or 5.

Despite my saying that it's summer time here, we've been lucky with the fact that it has been pretty rainy and cold this summer here in CLE. There have been beautiful days, but most have been damp and chilly -- no steamy days for us. I'm hopeful that we will be able to escape the steamy August that usually happens here in Bucks County. If I recall correctly for our time in Jersey (which is only an hour away from where we are moving to), it does get steamy there in August. We lived in a one-bedroom crackerjack box with NO air -- so I remember Augusts. And it wouldn't be a complete adventure in moving if we weren't doing it in the middle of that steamy August, right?